first day of term, I feel still quite enthralled but careful, cautious. I revealed my cards and aims to students in that I want this to be the most rewarding and exciting and Literary of semesters hitherto in my career. Find myself getting slow, tired, distracted.. the nap helped but didn’t completely rid me of the exhaustion from waking before 5. Excited I get to sleep in tomorrow. Till 6-something. Funny just writing that– The wine lowers in the glass and I think of tomorrow, how I can make it different, how I can push things, “things”, including me.. how? There, the wine done, and me with more thoughts with these books in front of me and the semester at my 12 and all I’ll be vacuumed into, experience-wise, some positive and other not so.
The notes just collect in the little pages, and I have to transfer them. But when do I have the time with the winery and the two sections I accepted? I have to move the words and notes, some sentences over, either to this project or the Massamen notebooks– there, there’s a title, maybe. Notebooks, and lost projects, making me so sad if nothing’s done with them, like the QS novel. What if tomorrow’s the day, that which I wake and stop all procrastination and just change everything, all standalones and partial pieces and everything out there, just out there, in the world and in readers’ hands– everywhere and everything, just me, howevermany hundreds of thousands of words.
Empty wine glass in sink and glass of water for Alice and this laptop with its fading bloody battery. I wait for the morning’s coffee– hot determined and ghostly. With luck, I’ll again wake early, so what, and I’ll stay up not go back to sleep and write a couple standalone pieces or add to this project or edit QS, whatever, just be that obsessed writer I want people to remember me as, for, by. Decided: not bringing laptop with me tomorrow.. I’ll try.. I have to, have to change. But when will I transfer the words? I hate this dilemma! When Kerouac was on the Road, he didn’t have a fucking laptop! Why am I so addicted to this thing? This is worse than being an addict, or alcoholic! It is, for me, truthfully.
9:17– Need a break, or something sweet. So I take three of the cookies from the plate on the range, the ones Alice baked earlier this evening, the ones Jackie loves and always states he’s entitled to, at all times of day, evening morning. No run since the race, Sunday, but I’ll run around PC on Thursday, from the parking lot and out to the fields.. what fields? I don’t know. It’s Petaluma, the east side, there’s fields everywhere there, right? Would rather be working in one of those fields, as a farmer, than inside, in that tasting room, having to touch all that musty mysteriously encrusted paper and coin money and take constant “instruction” from a dimwit rapidtalker.
Nearly done with cookie 2, and I just want to read tonight, find singular words in Kerouac’s work and think for myself and attach his sentiments to my life and what I’ve seen, now thinking of my early days in Sunriver, before the Maury Mountain Lane house, when we stayed in the Quelah rentals. Snow in front of that pond or small lake (pond), and how I’d just look out, walk around, not too far off, then come back to sit by the fire. What was I then.. 7, 8, 9, 10? Now I’d write, have more of that Cabernet no matter what time it was. And stay quiet.